![]() ![]() This gives Mare space, at last, to actually hold the people who need her most acutely - including her best friend Lori (Julianne Nicholson), who discovers John is having an affair. The limited series' finale, "Sacrament," lifts some of that weight from Mare just in time for her to capture Erin's killer, who turns out to be different from what the penultimate episode leads us to believe. Sometimes those small hurts lead to large fractures, which is what happens with Lori and her husband John (Joe Tippett) and John's brother Billy (Robbie Tann), who are Erin's cousins. From the shots of its streetscapes to its architecture, the images tell the story of a place that feels too close, crowded to the point that Mare can't help but step on a lot of toes without wanting and meaning to. "Mare of Easttown" gets under your skin in those quiet interludes. She also nails the regional accent, from what I understand, but her dramatic muscle really flexes when she says absolutely nothing. When Winslet allows the dam surrounding Mare's despair to crack a little, frosting the blank spaces between lines of dialogue with pure aching emotion, tearing your eyes away is impossible. If she were to stop, she'd have to mourn her son's suicide. The place itself has nothing on Mare, a woman whose determination to solve crimes and to serve and protect is really her way of hiding behind everyone else's grief. In my initial review I wrote about how heavily sadness hangs on this Pennsylvania working-class hamlet. In the end, what distinguishes "Mare of Easttown" from the typical murder mystery and other prestige shows – besides Winslet's superior performance – is the way it swims with and through grief. The woman knows and loves her Manhattans. But as Helen would probably attest, sometimes a muddle mixed with spirits, bitters and twists makes a smashing cocktail. And through the first four episodes, anyway, the sheer number of characters jostling for space muddled the plot. The walls of crazy and theories this show inspired were impressive and highly necessary, since every character with a line and a link to Mare has a story worth knowing and, perhaps, relevant to the main murder. Was her murder a one-off or related to the disappearance of Katie Bailey, the daughter of Mare's high school basketball teammate Dawn (Enid Graham)? Were there crimes within these crimes? In Erin's situation, yes! Several! Everything after that became questions leading into cliffhangers. Erin's murder drove the A-plot, often weaving down the road through an obstacle course of misdirects and MacGuffins as the mystery of her life informed her death. The fact that Ingelsby and series director Craig Zobel insisted on ensnaring the audience in uncertainty up to and throughout the finale, even after the guiltiest looking parties confessed, is a credit to their adroit construction and manipulation of dramatic tension.īut they also worked up the audience to expect nothing less. (By the "Law & Order" rule of "the most famous person in the story who isn't a series regular probably did it" making Richard look good for the crime early on.)īut the circle eventually tightened to those closest to the victim. Even Guy Pearce's literature professor and new guy in town Richard Ryan, Mare's most persistent suitor, had a huge question mark hovering over his head. Suspicion bounced around from Erin's cruel teenage ex-boyfriend Dylan (Jack Mulhern) to any number of men in her orbit. Her ex-husband Frank (David Denman) made the mistake of being a good Samaritan, which wouldn't have caused any trouble if Erin hadn't turned up dead and the paternity of the son she left behind never came into question. ![]() ![]() Mare's daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice) was among the last people to see her alive. But aside from those two the list of suspects stretched long enough to cordon off a soccer field. Except, well, for Mare or her mother Helen ( Jean Smart). Such a tightly knitted community means that anyone in that slumping burg could have a motive for murdering teen mother Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny). Series creator Brad Ingelsby writes the overfamiliarity of Easttown as a blessing and a curse for detective sergeant Mare Sheehan ( Kate Winslet), since everybody in the place knows her well enough to trust her while also resenting her. ![]() You probably didn't mean it literally, right? And, yet. If you described Easttown as an incestuous place at the start of " Mare of Easttown," you may have mixed emotions about how right you were all along. If you haven't watched the show yet, what are you waiting for? Stop reading now and don't come back until you've binged it. Spoiler warning: The following story discusses the finale of "Mare of Easttown" in detail. ![]()
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